Rasmodius said:

LME should be fine. The mixes aren't as perfectly uncolored, you can sometimes get some sediment or darkening after cooking.

Clarity matters more than sediment or color. Some ragged medium brown flakes at the bottom of an othewise crystal clear yellow mix can be okay, same can happen in agar if it gets a bit burnt.

This is light malt, I don't recall what % but probably 2-4%.



The first pic (and right side on the comparison) is clean. The left pic is bacterial af. Notice how much cloudier it is. BUT there is also a gigantic brick of myc in there. Third pic is the bacterial jar after giving it a bit of a swish. The ragged bits of sediment aren't a concern, the general cloudiness is. Both of these were tested on plates when I noc'd the LC jars and the bacterial showed up there too. Always good to double check.

My darkest ever mix came from soaking clean alder chips (for smoking meat, yellow bag) in water in a bucket for some weeks, and then using that like grain water in addition to the regular agar mix (so very high nute). I made it for p cyans but even the cubes exploded on it. Tried it again a year later in the same bucket and every jar failed to colonize. I think some nasty non-organism (chemicals etc) must have gotten in the bucket. Anyway, my guess is their LC is enriched with stuff like that. Varied diet etc.

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All the LC's I multiplied from clear liquid culture syringes have done great...part of my problem and why I posted this is because these new LC's are SO DARK that even adding 5cc is going to darken the entire solution. I found this pic on google images, looks a lot like what I'm working with.

Claude and Google AI are telling me it will be fine growing these in an LME solution, but I'm kind of bummed that I'm not going to have perfectly clear liquid cultures that are easy to tell if contaminated just by sight.